Sunday, May 3, 2015

The Stress of Moving

It's been nearly two years since I quit my full time job in order to be a stay at home mom. Since them, I've held a number of part time jobs to make ends meet. When Miss C was born, I wasn't able to keep a steady part time job, and instead tutor on an as-needed basis for former students.

When we had full gardens in our backyard and complete control over our surroundings, life was not easy but not very stressful, either. In January 2014, we prepared to sell our house by cleaning, painting walls and cabinets, and removing 75% of our belongings and putting them in my dad's garage. We went on the market in May. From that day on, our house was no longer ours, but someone else's that we were staying in. Our first realtor told us that people liked gardens, and we could leave them. Last summer, we planted a moderate garden. It wasn't as much as we'd like, but we 'knew' that we'd be somewhere else come the next spring with bees and chickens and food forests as far as we could see. We got very few showings with that realtor, switched to a new one in November, and tucked in through the holidays.

Come January, we still weren't getting showings. We tore out the old floors in the first floor of our house and replaced them ourselves with wood laminate flooring. We replaced the dated sink in the main bathroom, and removed all of the wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom and repainted the entire basement a more neutral color. We removed the wallpaper border and curtains in the kitchen to make it look cleaner and removed even more of our belongings. We finally tore out our garden beds and seeded the lawn this spring.It was a sad day and even worse if we can't sell because that is a significant amount of our food

In that year, we've also dropped the price by 10%. At our current price, we'd break even. We started getting showings, but no takers. For every bit of feedback, we'd tweak something about the house. We were told by our most recent showing that we were overpriced. After talking to our agent, it seems we are. We have to either drop our price significantly or put in an HVAC system as we have baseboard and window units right now. Either way, we'd lose all of the money we have in savings for buying another house. We also learned that our fall back plan - renting the house out and buying another house - is impossible as one needs to have two years of being a landlord as income on tax documents in order to procure another mortgage. So right now, we're stuck in a holding pattern. We can't afford to stay here, and we can't afford to move.